Month: November 2014

  • Procedural Game Jam 2014 – Concluding notes for Forska

    I said I’d write up a few notes about how I went about building Forska.  Here is some information on various aspects of the project: Terrain Generation Currently the project just uses Worley (i.e. Voronoi) noise to generate the mountains – I found a good implementation here that I got working in Unity with minimal…

  • Procedural Game Jam 2014 – Part 10, VR addendum

    This isn’t really for the jam itself, but is one of the “next phase” branches I have for my research.  I’m very interested in immersive spaces that aren’t photoreal, nor trying to be.  I finally got my Oculus DK2 working well enough to try Forska, in real time, in a virtual reality setting: A huge…

  • Procedural Game Jam 2014 – Part 9, Web and Real Time Experiments

    I added a web-friendly version. It doesn’t look quite as nice, and using the portals between worlds is a bit slower, but it runs pretty well. You can get away with a lot when you only have to worry about the user looking at one image at a time, and when interactions are every 1-1/2…

  • Procedural Game Jam 2014 – Part 8 – Uploaded!

    Posted! You can download (Mac or PC) here: http://tfurmanskigmailcom.itch.io/forska I added in weather and spotlights on points of interest. This actually makes night a better time to look for things, but I find that kind of balances the open exploration during daytime. I might actually take a stab at making a web player version –…

  • Procedural Game Jam 2014 – Part 7

    As the above image suggests, you can go to different worlds.  Currently it’s a different terrain and textures, from ice to desert to forest, but it’s easily expandable.  With a bit of work I could make the textures themselves procedural.  I’ll probably go for weather first, trying to make each space have its own take…

  • Procedural Game Jam 2014 – Part 6

    I took back the sky!  That is to say, I removed the static skybox and placed a series of concentric spheres in the world.  I also gave the spheres shaders that would let me adjust their color and transparency. I’m not sure I’ll have time during the Game Jam to fully implement proper day/night cycles…

  • Procedural Game Jam 2014 – Part 5

    My code’s getting pretty messy.  I found a good source for Worley noise (aka “Voronoise”) to throw into the terrain generation mix of “spices”. I also consolidated a lot of the functions into a single “Generate World” button – the idea is that eventually I won’t even have to press it, the computer will know…

  • Procedural Game Jam 2014 – Part 4

    A lot of time lost in the noise – Perlin noise, generally.  A large part of the day was also figuring out that some functions I use swap the X and Z coordinates while processing heightmaps…don’t ask me how long that took me to figure out. Although in retrospect I did get the beginnings of…

  • Procedural Game Jam 2014 – Part 3

    Finally a name for the project – “Forska” – Swedish for “Researching” (according to Google Translate). I thought I’d have done more with cities today, although I did get this: Wang Tile enthusiasts and some sprite artists might recognize the image’s significance – it’s a (slightly skewed) map of the 16 different “tiles” needed to…

  • Procedural Game Jam 2014 – Part 2

    As I’ve hinted before, this event has been a good incentive to consolidate a lot of my knowledge and procedural “bag of tricks” from older code forms into Unity. I spent far too long today toying with the terrain system, and adopting various cellular automata, erosion systems, and diffusion limited aggregation processes from my sketches…